The Country Dance

A company of elegantly dressed men and women dance in a ring on the grass before a country house, the couples linking hands in the figures of a country dance while a fiddler plays at the side and servants and children look on. Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin, celebrated above all as the draughtsman who recorded the life of eighteenth-century Paris — the salons, the fairs, the crowds of the Palais-Royal — here practised the rare oil painting of a fête champêtre, translating his quick, observant pencil into light, airy pigment: the pastel silks of the dancers, the dappled shade of the trees, the easy sociability of the age of Watteau’s successors. Painted about 1760–62, it is one of the few finished canvases by an artist whom the Goncourt brothers called the most Parisian of painters. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.